ATLANTIC CITY

ATLANTIC CITY;Johan's the Sixth

By BILL KENT

Published: June 23, 1996

ATLANTIC CITY'S most arrogant chef insists that he's mellowed. Johan Vroegop (pronounced VROO-hop, with a guttural h) still chews on a cigar, swigs a daily bottle of Chinese ginseng soda and boasts that any restaurant with his name on it is "the best in the world." But the man who used to run the most expensive restaurant in Atlantic City, if not the entire state, has changed his tune.

"It's a new world out there," said Mr. Vroegop, who was born in the Netherlands but considers himself Flemish. He sipped his fifth coffee of the day and flipped his cigar in the direction of the lawyers and City Hall bureaucrats outside the plate-glass windows of Johan's, his sixth restaurant here in 20 years. "You have to keep up with the times. You have to keep young. That's why I drink the ginseng."

In truth, Mr. Vroegop looks every one of his 55 years, and although he says "you can't find Flemish cuisine like this anywhere," his menu does offer Jersey Shore standards like coquilles St. Jacques. Mr. Vroegop shrugged that off: "You have to have some things to please the public."

It is almost shocking that the chef, who used to raise his prices to keep people away, is now playing to the crowd "that works hard for a living and doesn't spend the arm and the leg." His location, on Atlantic Avenue two blocks from the Boardwalk, is not on the paths beaten by 330,000 tourists and gamblers a day.

"Which is exactly the way it should be!" Mr. Vroegop thundered. "Everybody comes into Atlantic City and goes after the tourists. Nobody pays attention to the people who are here and want someplace where they can feel sophisticated and relaxed."

A former food and beverage executive at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, Mr. Vroegop was involved in two restaurants here before he opened Zelande in 1981 in a private house in the bayside Ducktown neighborhood. For six years, high society could not be kept away from the 26-seat cottage. A fixed-price five-course dinner soaked in cream sauce cost $100 a person.

Mr. Vroegop was known to bellow in the early morning at suppliers who delivered what he thought were inferior ingredients. He habitually studied his diners through a peephole in the kitchen door and snarled at those who salted their food before tasting it. And he refused to kowtow to high-rolling gamblers. On weekends, Mr. Vroegop and his American-born wife, Jill, turned away more gamblers than most casino restaurants seated.

Most food reviewers admired Mr. Vroegop's cuisine, although when Edward Hitzel of The Atlantic City Press questioned the prices in 1983, Mr. Vroegop said he became so enraged that he had a heart attack. Mr. Hitzel, now the editor of a New Jersey restaurant newsletter, said Mr. Vroegop's health problems "probably had more to do with tasting all those cream sauces than I anything I wrote."

When the first casino opened in 1978, the city had 243 restaurants. Now, fewer than 50 non-casino restaurants remain. Mr. Vroegop said he had to close Zelande because the neighborhood deteriorated so much that limousines were vandalized on the street. He also admitted, "What we were doing there was very much the thing in the 80's, and I could see that any good thing cannot last."

A conflict with a business partner about "whether we are to have the best restaurant in the world or a disco with the fried potatoes and chicken wings" shortened the life of another Johan's. For three years Mr. Vroegop ran a restaurant in eastern Pennsylvania, "but I got tired of looking at the deer coming to the house all the time."

He wanted to look at young people, he said. He was about to open a restaurant in the South Beach section of Miami Beach when he was hired to run two restaurants here. Now, instead of deer, Mr. Vroegop has city and county employees, and lawyers, lots of them, haunting his restaurant for power breakfasts and lunches.

The new Johan's, which opened in May, lacks a liquor license, and Mr. Vroegop is concerned that professional workers are not used to remaining in town after 5 P.M., when he begins serving dinner. But when asked if his restaurant might fail, he bit down hard on his cigar and said, "I don't know the meaning of the word."

Photo: "You have to keep up with the times," says Johan Vroegop, whose latest restaurant is catering to lawyers, not gamblers, on Atlantic Avenue. (John Sotomayor/The New York Times)